corkscrew shaped cocks

Beware of your desire, whatever that is. Beware of your identity, whatever that is. Identity doesn’t exist except as political illusion. Desire is not a repository of truth, but a culturally constructed artefact, modeled by social violence, by incentives, by rewards, but also by fear of exclusion. There is no homosexual desire or heterosexual desire, as there is no bisexual desire: desire is always an arbitrary cutting in the unbroken and polyvocal flow [...]. The anal revolution is impure. 

The body’s architecture is political. The practice of fist fucking, which had a systemic development throught the gay and lesbian community in the 70s, must be considered as an example of high contrasexual technology. Anal workers are the new proletarians of a feasible contrasexual revolution. 

The anus offers three fundamental characteristics that makes it the transitory center of contrasexual deconstruction. First: the anus is a universal erogenous center which crosses the anatomical limits imposed by sexual difference and where roles and registers are universally reversible (who doesn’t have an anus?). Second: the anus is a zone of primeval passivity, a pleasure and excitement producing center that does not belong to prescribed orgasmic zones. Third: the anus represents a space of technological work; it’s a factory where the body is replenished as contrasexual. The anus’ work is not aimed at reproduction nor is founded on the institution of a romantic bound. It generates benefits which are not measurable in a heterocentric economy. 

The anus’ recovery as a contrasexual pleasure center has some common points with dildo logics: every bodily place isn’t just a potential surface to relocate the dildo, but also functions as an entry-orifice, a vanishing point, and exhaust valve, a virtual axis of action-passion. 

Human nature is the result of a social technology that reproduces in bodies, places, and discourses, the equation nature = heterosexuality. The heterosexual system is a social instrument of femininity and masculinity production which operates through the division and fragmentation of the body when it requires to cut out some organs, thus generating zones of high sensitivity and motor density (visual, tactory, olfactive...) so that it can transform them in the natural and anatomic center of sexual difference. 

Sexual roles and practices naturally attributed to male and female gender are an arbitrary ensemble of bodies inscribed rules which aim to ensure the material exploitation of one sex on the other. Sexual difference is an hetero-partition of the body which can only be asymmetrical. The process of creation of sexual difference is a technological reduction operation which abstracts certain parts from the body’s totality and isolates them to turn them into sexual signifiers. Men and women are metonymical constructions of the heterosexual system of production and reproduction that legitimates women’s subordination as sexual workforce and means of reproduction. This exploitation is structural and the sexual benefits that heterosexual men and women draw from it force to reduce the erotic surface to the reproductive sexual organs and to privilege the penis as the sole mechanic center of sexual impulse production. 

The body is a socially built text, an organic archive of humanity’s history, it being an history of sexual (re)production; some of its codes are naturalized, some others remain elliptical, others are systematically eliminated and erased. (Hetero)sexuality, far from spontaneously raising from every freshly born body, must be re-inscribed or re-established through constant operations of repetition and re-citations of (male and female) codes socially enshrined as natural.

Contrasexuality has the task of identifying the erroneous spaces, the text’s structure flaws, (the intersexual, the ermaphrodite, the madwoman, the butch, the fag, the dildo-carrying-lesbian, the ermafaglesbian) and to strenghten the power of deviances, of the drifts from the heterocentric system. 

Le Désir homosexuel is a weapon. But it’s not a steel sheet, nor a bullet, nor a missil, not even a bomb. Even if it multiplies the transformative (not destructive) power of all the above. Hocquenghem’s text is a critical weapon invented by one of the few bloodless revolutions of the twentieth century: feminism and the movements for the emancipation of sexual minorities activated the first revolution built through language, drugs, music and sex. Parting from necropolitical weapons that characterized the historical struggles of the twentieth century (from the machine gun to Auschwitz’s gas chambers to the H-bomb), the gay, lesbian and trans movement puts the vulnerability of the body and its survival at the center of the political discourse and makes culture, as a forum of creation and exchange of ideas where the limits of what’s socially possibe are defined, a  the center of the struggle. 

These peaceful revolutions could be called, thinking about the libidinal theory outlined by Le Désir homosexuel, anal politics. It’s about forms of action and critique that arose as reactions against the biopolitical strategies of late nineteenth and twentieth century that invented sexual deviancy and its pathologies through medical-juridical methods, as well as against the necropolitical excesses of the first half of the twentieth century: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, as well as the decolonisation wars in Algeria and Vietnam. Between 1968 and 1988, anal politics are invented as collective agency against (bio-necro-) politics of war which to that point were the traditional form of social goverment: exercises of power where mutilation and death were converted to in form of defense of populations’ life. These micropolitics of faggots, dykes, transvestites and transsexual are opposed to the traditional war politics (both biopolitics and necropolitics refer to war as a mode of ultimate control) and propose a new mode of politics as relation, feast, comunication, self-experimention and pleasure.

We could say that anal politics are counter-biopolitics. So, body politics, redefinition of human species and its methods of (re)production. However, the body is not conceived anymore as a natural storage of qualities and flaws to preserve or eliminate through education, discipline, sterilization or death. It’s not about the human body anymore, be it female or male, nor about the racially superior or inferior body, but of the body as a vulnerable relational platform, historical and socially built and with constantly redefined limits. 

Le Désir homosexuel is an instruction manual to make an anti-system orifice installed in every body work: the ANUS. Precise, offensive, vital, it’s a revolutionary machine highly manageable, and conceived for collective use. How to know if you still got your anus? How to write with your anus (if you still have it)? What can we learn from the anus? How to make the anal revolution? Search. 

Do you really know what the anus is? Then answer: is it a sexual organ? If it is, what gender is it? To which sexuality its practices belong? Don’t answer. First, discard every anatomical certainty, distrust every visual and linguistic evidence. First of all, consult the Spanish dictionary of the Real Academia. Anus:  «Orifice which ends the digestive tube and through which it expels excrements». Compare this definition to those of other organs in the nearest proximity. Penis:  «male organ of man and some animals, which is used to urinate and copulation». Vagina: «membranous conduit that in female mammals extends from the vulva to the uterus». Vulva: «parts that surround and constitute the external part of the vagina». Uterus: «empty viscera, shaped like a bulb, placed in the woman’s and female mammals’ pelvis, where menstrual haemorrage is produced and where the fetus develops until birth». First provisional conclusion: some organs enjoy a privileged biopolitical status. Only the penis is regarded as a sexual organ, since the anus and the vagina ar respectively relegated as excretory and pregnancy organs. So, how to define love’s anal practices? A penis that doesn’t copulate, standing by this definition, can still be considered a penis? And an anus that copulates is to be considered a penis, a membrane or an empty viscera? Let’s leave these issues in stand-by. Derived suspect: the Real Academia de la Lengua is involved in the Anal Castration Regime. The objective of the activists of FHAR (Front homosexuel d'action révolutionnaire) will be to invent the anal language.

Le Sacre du Printemps [Romeo Castellucci]

Silvia Calderoni in MDLSX [Motus]